Shine light in the tunnels

It's an outrageous fact that the Port Authority — a $4.4 billion-a-year agency serving two states — is truly accountable to the citizens of neither.

Created by New York and New Jersey under a compact approved by Congress, the Port Authority claims exemption from many state laws on both sides of the Hudson, including Freedom of Information statutes that are an indispensable check on abuse and corruption.

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And if ever a bureaucracy needed checking, it's the one where appointees of Gov. Christie thought they could get away with shutting down lanes on the George Washington Bridge, subjecting thousands of commuters to needless chaos, for political reasons.

Investigations of that scandalous stunt from last September have exposed deeper dysfunction . But it should not take legislative subpoenas to force the PA's inner workings into the light of day. By rights, all it should take is a letter or email, whether from an inquiring journalist or curious citizen — backed up by a law mandating public disclosure of public information.

Trouble is, enacting such a mandate requires four legislative houses and two governors to get on the same page.

So far, legislation that would subject the Port Authority to the Freedom of Information laws of both states has passed the Assembly and Senate in Albany and the Senate in Trenton.

The stumbling block is New Jersey Assemblyman John Wisniewski, who supports the bill in principle but wants broader reform of how the authority operates. A comprehensive overhaul is needed, but finding six-way consensus on something that complicated will be no sure thing.

The freedom-of-information fix, meanwhile, is clean, straightforward and so obviously necessary that it has received not a single "no" vote in the three houses that considered it.

Wisniewski must make it four houses.

New York can start the ball rolling. The Legislature must deliver its Port Authority FOI bill to Gov. Cuomo ASAP, and then Cuomo must sign it — to let the sun shine in.